Danube River is increasingly polluted

The Danube River is becoming more polluted with particles of plastic, pesticides and pharmaceutical waste, declared experts quoted by the British newspaper The Guardian, challenging the recycling system and the European Union environmental legislation.

After surviving decades of massive industrial pollution in the communist period, the ecological status of the Danube has significantly improved. But new sources of pollution threat the river that ranks first in the world in terms of the number of countries it is crossing, notes the Guardian. Gabor Farkass, director of Hungarian Plastics Association, bemoans his local authority’s careless attitude to recycling. “There are some sad pictures coming out in the media, because [scientists] check the riverbed, they check inside fish and birds, and they find a load of plastic,” he says.

The last Joint Danube Survey report by International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR) lists the top 20 hazardous substances to the entire river and found that just seven of them are officially reported on. “We have a massive lack of information about what kind of pollutants industries are releasing into the Danube,” says Adam Kovacs, technical expert for pollution control at the ICPDR. He says that EU legislation is outdated.

A vast number of industries use plastics in items ranging from automotive parts, cleaning agents and cosmetics to packaging, agricultural and pharmaceutical items. “Our ministry is working with plastics manufacturers, trying to reduce their plastic output into the Danube down to zero.” says Franz Wagner, from Austria’s federal ministry of agriculture, forestry, environment and water management, which funded research into the phenomena after nets in a study on Danube fish larvae also landed lots of plastic particles.